DEMOCRATIZING GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBALIZING DEMOCRACY

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central value-liberty-in whose name the conflict was ultimately waged, by making expedient ... be that the market alone cannot maintain a stable social, political, ...
Published in the special issue on Globalization and Democracy of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Edited by Ronaldo Munck and Barry K. Gills. DEMOCRATIZING GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBALIZING DEMOCRACY By BARRY K. GILLS ABSTRACT: The article begins with a critique of the failure of the present world order, based on its exclusivity and reliance on a traditional international relations paradigm, including nationalism and cultural particularism. The post-cold war impetus toward universal liberalism has brought about conditions rendering this paradigm untenable. Globalization requires a new political order if universal economic liberalism is to be stable. However, there remains a clash of paradigms rather than a clash of civilizations, and a new balance is needed between realist, liberal, and Marxist paradigms. An alternative world order will require democratizing globalization and globalizing democracy and will rest on articulating radical new conceptions and practices of citizenship bridging local, national, regional, and global political spaces. New concepts and values such as global justice, global solidarity, global democracy, and global citizenship are taking form and informing the course of the democratic revolution on the global scale. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected. Thomas Paine, Preface to the French Edition of The Rights of Man (1791) The present world order is based on very traditional thinking, both politically and economically. There has been much discussion of the so-called nonstate actors and the rise and importance of nongovernmental organizations and other international societal factors in recent years of globalization. Yet we can observe for ourselves how it is still the most powerful governments of the world that determine the primary course of action and define the parameters of mainstream discussion whenever there is a crisis. Thus, the embedded power structure of the world order has been highlighted even in the so-called era of globalization. Nevertheless, if we look deeper, we can see things differently, and we may realize the potential for positive change, Rather than accepting the still reigning paradigm of (past) international relations, with its enduring feature of governance by a few great powers based on their ability to use military force, we must urgently look for ways to turn to a positive alternative. We must search for ways to break out of the iron cage of the old paradigms. FAILURE OF THE POSTWAR LIBERAL WORLD ORDER At the end of the last world war and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, it was already obvious that nationalism and empire were concepts that had brought enormous human suffering, conflict, and upheaval. No stable or just world order could any longer be based on either a narrow nationalism or the drive for empire by the Western bourgeois (Carr 1968; Linklater 1997) with which it was historically associated. It was objectively necessary to go beyond the

confining limits of nationalism and embrace a new order marked by much higher levels of international peace and cooperation. It was equally necessary to abandon imperialism and enter a period when potentially all peoples had the right to sovereignty and in which all shared in international duties and responsibilities in the common world order. It was also recognized, by realists as well as idealists, that to enable the construction of this new world order, the West would have to abandon a narrow cultural particularism and attempt to adopt more universal and even cosmopolitan bases for the right to lead or govern at the center of world power (Bull 1977). The reality, however, fell somewhat short of this expectation. Postwar international history was marred by decades of endemic global conflict, which historians call the cold war era. During that period, the great powers often acted brutally and cynically in pursuit of their perceived power interests. The foreign policy of the West, led by the United States, sometimes sacrificed even its central value-liberty-in whose name the conflict was ultimately waged, by making expedient political alliances with reactionary and antidemocratic forces and governments. Rather than constructing a truly inclusive world order, and despite the existence of the United Nations Organization, world order remained based on a clear hierarchy of power among states. This international hierarchy, once established, exacerbated the problem of historically embedded asymmetry of power and wealth between the Western powers and the formerly colonial peoples of the world. The opportunity for inclusion was therefore compromised. The world order was maintained by the traditional means of balance of power, alliances, and diplomacy in a manner that perpetuated the old international relations paradigm. The Westphalian system, being based on the principle of sovereignty for states and their intrinsic right to use military force, produced a system dominated by a few states wielding the greatest military and economic power. With the end of the cold war came an opportunity for the West to review its policies and to reassess the project of universal liberalism. Suddenly, there was more official support for democracy than during the previous cold war period of ideological and strategic rivalry, during which the West had often supported undemocratic regimes and suppressed popular movements for social, economic, and political change (Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi 2000). Above all, however, there was a renewed and vigorous attempt to construct a liberalized world economy and make this system universally inclusive. Within a short time, this impetus toward universal liberalism based on the social and economic practices of the West became popularly known as globalization. In a previous generation, this impetus had been understood simply as Westernization or modernization. It is the very extension of this Western project of universal liberalism that has brought about new conditions that now render the old paradigm of international relations and world order historically inadequate. Taking globalization seriously must imply taking its logic to logical conclusions. In other words, to the extent that there is now-in the post-cold war interregnum-already a truly global economic system based on the free movement of capital, then there is also an objective and logical need for new forms of global political order to accompany this global economic system. Simply maintaining the international political status quo will not suffice. Without a correspondingly new global political order, the world (economic) order will be unstable. By remaining too exclusive, the West will guarantee instability and disorder in the future. You cannot sustain a truly international, or global, political and economic system on the basis of the exclusion of the majority from real power or influence over it. If the West fails to

measure up to this challenge, it risks undoing the liberal and capitalist order it has sought to construct since the last great world crisis and most recently under the slogan of globalization. To put it differently, having largely already succeeded in bringing about a global liberal and capitalist economic order, the West, in partnership with all the world, must now realize that this economic order requires an accompanying global political system. This new political order is necessary to stabilize the world economy and make it function properly. However, if we have learned anything from the past century of the expansion of capitalism to a global system, it must be that the market alone cannot maintain a stable social, political, or economic order over the long term. The classic nineteenth century liberal world order ended in a historic cataclysm (Polanyi 1944) and revealed itself to be unstable and unsustainable. The real character of that world order was not, however, truly liberal but rather a condition of the coexistence of antagonistic principles: liberal and imperial, competitive and monopoly capitalism, freedom and slavery (including the colonial enslavement of whole populations to imperial rule). These contending antagonistic principles coexisted not in a stable harmony but rather in a very high state of historical tension. In the aftermath of the debacle of that world order, it was widely recognized and accepted that the market economy needed stabilizing through new types of state regulation and intervention and new social compacts. The state, popular political processes, and domestic and international institutions have all been crucial in maintaining the conditions for both the stability and expanded reproduction of the capitalist economic system (Habermas 1988). In fact, it is legitimate to argue that the lesson of the failure of the previous liberal-imperial world order was that capitalism itself could not exist without an appropriate role for the state or an inclusive social contract that gave labor essential rights and legitimate political participation. The post-World War II world order was based, therefore, on the pragmatic need to establish a balance that avoided the extremes represented by the Scylla of market-oriented savage capitalism and the Charybdis of state-dominated and imperial or monopoly capitalism. A CLASH OF PARADIGMS, NOT A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS Speaking as an international political economist, it may be worth saying that we are still witnessing a historical clash of paradigms rather than a clash of civilizations as the defining dynamic of world order. In the present impetus toward (neo)liberal economic globalization, we are seeing the continued playing out of the attempt to realize the liberal utopia first fully explicated by Adam Smith more than two hundred years ago. In the liberal paradigm's vision of the future, the traditional international relations paradigm-with its basis in state sovereignty exercised over a national economy and the states' intrinsic right and ability to use military force-is overthrown. Rather than warfare and survival as key concerns, liberalism promises peace and prosperity to all humanity. The idea that we can eliminate all distortions introduced into the world economy by the interventions and other actions of governments has been a constant in the whole history of liberalism and in its recent reincarnation as neoliberalism. One central liberal idea is the harmonization of interests, despite the inequalities generated by private property, commodity production and exchange, and capital-wage relations, as well as the uneven development in space and time that is a feature of world economic history. In the liberal utopia, all production will be maximized as market actors are free to allocate resources most efficiently, and all consumption will be optimized as all consumers are free to choose the best products at the best prices. In this vision, the prosperity of humanity is maximized due to the optimum

economic efficiency of the entire system, which then comes to operate as a self-regulating mechanism, finding its own equilibrium and having a tendency to allow prices, profits, and wages to equalize over time and space in the system as a whole. This too is the utopian promise of neoliberal economic globalization as espoused today. Once again, the reality is very different, and it has been for more than two hundred years of liberalism's history. The liberal paradigm has not entirely replaced the realist or driven it out. The realist international relations paradigm, with the survival and the power of states as its central interests, refuses to disappear, and it constantly reasserts its prerogatives, thus distorting the presumed pure natural order of the liberal economy. Moreover, as Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalist social relations tried to argue, there is an ingrained exploitative feature in the unceasing quest for greater profits, in the expansion of capital-wage relations, and in the process of commodification of more and more spheres of life. This exploitation is not easily amenable to any natural harmonization of interests; rather, it generates a continued source of social conflict, displacement, and antagonism, which Marx referred to as the "class struggle" though others may simply call it politics and now the politics of globalization. The Marxist critique rejected both the realist and the liberal paradigms and argued that both were fatally flawed. The Marxist alternative vision of the future of the world economy was, however, every bit as utopian as was the liberal. Marx predicted a world without states, without classes, without money, without poverty, without exploitation, in which production would be maximized and all human needs would be met, all "uneven development" would be resolved, and a great harmony of interests would prevail over permanent social peace. This was to be achieved through means opposite those of the liberal paradigm, that is, via the abolition of private property and the market and their substitution by common property and a planned economy, which in the medium term would require a major direct role for the state in the economic system. We can easily recognize elements of truth in all three paradigms, which is to say that while none of the three is really an accurate or perfect paradigm, there is something in each that we can recognize, even on the grounds of common sense. In reality, all three paradigms are in historical tension with one another, and they continue to contend with one another in the world today It is naive in both analytical and historical terms to believe that one of the three is likely to, or indeed ought to, entirely succeed and completely displace the other two. This being the case, the real question is how to shape the process of economic globalization, which is already so powerful, in ways that can reduce the levels of social disruption and human suffering involved and that do not repress the popular will but rather empower it. In short, the emergence of a new paradigm of world order suited to the material conditions of economic globalization today is not a technical, technological, or purely economic matter but a thoroughly and profoundly political matter to be resolved through political processes alone. This is therefore not a matter of calibrating only states and markets but rather states, markets, and social forces (or classes if you prefer) and their mutual relations. In short, it is not a question of the ultimate victory of one paradigm over the others but of constructing a sustainable and just world order that brings some new balance among all three contending paradigms of world order: realist, liberal, and Marxist. BUILDING AN ALTERNATIVE WORLD ORDER

While a few years ago, many people could still believe that a liberal global capitalist economy would look after itself and constitute a natural order, it is now all too apparent that no such natural economic order exists. The advocates of global economic liberalization as the only way forward, the single best practice for all economies, have learned that the process is far from being apolitical. However, they have apparently still not accepted the full political consequences of the liberal economic order they espouse. The "politics of resistance" to globalization (Gills 2000c; 2001) and the rise of the myriad so called anticapitalist movements around the world during the past few years should be understood as being representative of the popularly perceived need to construct a universal, just, and inclusive form of world order. This new conception of world order is based on radically new conceptions and practices of citizenship bridging local, national, and global political spaces. It clearly brings into focus, in terms of political discourse, the need felt by ordinary people to be fully included in the major decisions that determine their life chances. Most important, therefore, it is not only elites and governments that must be directly included in the reconfigured world order of globalization but ordinary people, from all walks of life, all genders, all religions, and all regions of the globe. This constituency is in fact the global citizenry. What was once posed as a national question (i.e., political order) now becomes a truly global question, perhaps for the first time in human history. This debate is no longer a matter of whether globalization but rather of which globalization. This is essentially a political matter, not a narrow technical or economic issue. Thus, it is not very useful to understand the new (global) social movements arising to protest the present direction of globalization processes as simply being antiglobalization (or even anticapitalist for that matter, since this invokes an all-encompassing but inherently vague notion of capitalism itself). Nor is it fruitful or right to merely reject the legitimacy of such growing popular protest to economic globalization and its social and environmental effects as being merely wrongheaded. Ignoring the problem or resorting to repressive tactics will only further exacerbate the underlying reasons for these global protests, which in fact represent only the tip of an iceberg of popular responses to the myriad impacts of globalization on our lives (Bourdieu et al. 1999). So we should view today's global protest movements as being symptomatic of something far greater than a mere reaction to globalization. They represent a popular response to the question of which globalization and as such, they are an expression of the popular desire for meaningful political participation in its governing processes. As John Kenneth Galbraith (2000, 2001) has argued, the governing elites of the past decade have tended to talk too much about free trade and not enough about social justice and stability. Moreover, the new resistance movements instinctively represent the view that whatever globalization may be, it should not come at the expense of the social gains of the past century. Nor should the imperative of further economic globalization via liberalization and free trade constitute an obstacle to improving social, political, economic, and human rights in the future, particularly of labor and in regard to women, agriculture, and the environment. In other words, perhaps the people of the world would like globalization to represent a continuation of social and political progress rather than a sacrifice of this progress on the high altar of the free market.

When I recently asked a group of my students, studying the political economy of development, to discuss the differences between national development and global development, their responses were somewhat surprising, and enlightening. They strongly tended to associate the national not only with welfarist goals but also with selfish, zero-sum, and conflict-oriented goals and behavior. They associate global development, however, with an aspiration for or potential of transcending the barriers that governments erect between peoples and with finding common solutions to common problems through increasing cooperation. That is, their instincts are searchingly positive when it comes to the global dimension of world order, as opposed to their suspicions of the traditional national framework of action and understanding, which they seem to think has too many negative aspects. Given that the popular movements of this era, as in the past, should be assumed to represent an expression of the popular will rather than an irrelevant minority, we should heed the words of that great democratic revolutionary Thomas Paine, that it is from the popular will that real reforms can be expected. The recent financial and economic crises in East Asia illustrated the potential negative side of globalization, that is, that as neoliberal economic globalization proceeds, it generates increased risk of macroeconomic destabilization. But it also creates popular demands for democratization and greater opposition to existing oligarchic-authoritarian power structures (Gills 2000a). Globalization, therefore, cannot be left to elites alone or to governments only to sort out, which would only reinforce the reigning paradigm of international relations and reproduce the embedded global inequality over which the states system presides. What we need is a very strong, healthy dose of globalization from below. Only this can create a necessary balance between governmental and popular political will and adequately redress the question of who controls the direction of globalization. Only by democratizing globalization, which means enacting an inclusiveness in the political sphere in ways that incorporate the expression of the popular will not only of citizens of the rich countries but of all peoples, can we establish such a balance. That is, only by global democratic revolution will economic globalization find its appropriate political counterpart. The alternative to this is further exclusiveness and a narrowing of political power to a small elite. Such an elitist alternative in fact represents the antithesis of the globalization of democracy. We should remember that Adam Smith himself, the founder of the liberal tradition in international political economy, was reacting against a mercantilist order that was dominated by and favored a small collusive elite of financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and state rulers. He saw both political freedom and economic freedom as the necessary revolutionary counterpoint to the oligarchicauthoritarian capitalism that he so abhorred and that he intellectually denounced as parasitic on the nation, indeed all nations, and their common wealth. If in the end, the project of universal economic liberalism is understood in the popular imagination to mean only that real power has been taken from the people or the nation and concentrated in an elite, even if this is a global or transnational class, then increasing resistance to this world order will be historically inevitable. Again, this very real political problem will not go away simply by ignoring it or by repressing it. In fact, the extent to which repression is used against the popular movements is a measure of the extent to which globalization actually undermines democracy. This tension, which we have all recently witnessed in the official and police responses to a series of major global protest events staged at economic summits, indicates the possibility of a serious

contradiction or even open antagonism between popular democracy and neoliberal economic globalization. CONCEPTS AND VALUES OF A GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC THEORY If there is global capitalism, then the system gives rise to and in fact requires fundamental counterparts, including global justice, global solidarity, global democracy, and global citizenship, the last of these perhaps being especially significant. We need a credible political theory of global democracy based on the new concept of global citizenship rather than merely a pragmatic problem-solving approach. If democracy is a process of building countervailing powers, then the democratic theory we have at present, which is based on countries and their domestic political order, must be transposed to the global level. To do so, we must also elevate or transpose the classic enlightenment democratic ideals of equality, justice, solidarity (fraternity), and liberty to the global level. Defining "global equality," "global justice," "global solidarity," and "global liberty" will be the prerequisites to formulating a theory of global democracy and global citizenship. In my own view, these definitions and this global democratic theory does not necessarily require a global or "world polity" (Ruggie 1998) or a theory of a "global state" as such (Shaw 2000). The tenor of this new period, which is above all given to a diversity of social movements from across the globe, does not provide grounds for easy acceptance of a centralization of power and authority, but actually the opposite. As in the history of many other world orders, states, and civilizations of the human past, there may come a point when whatever the elite at the apex of the social system have designed or intended, they can no longer hope to control the direction of change. Rather, it is the social forces from below, often representing the lowest social orders, that do at such times make the real difference. Christianity, for example, began as a tiny movement within a great and powerful empire, and its membership was drawn from the lowest social strata, such as slaves, political outcasts, women, and downtrodden and oppressed peoples such as the Jews of Palestine. In the end, however, it was not the mighty empire of the Romans that prevailed, but rather the strikingly antipodal communal and compassionate ideology represented by the Christian religion that transformed Rome itself into a holy city and remade the whole of Western civilization. The search for human liberty does not usually find its true expression in the construction of huge edifices of centralized and bureaucratic state power, however welfarist the claims within which their attempts at legitimation may be couched. Rather, liberty, when popularized and captured by the popular will and imagination, immediately tends to become a truly revolutionary idea and brings in its train the challenging of the status quo. As the great student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville (1840), remarked on the process of the democratic revolution, a people that has existed for centuries under a system of castes and classes can arrive at a democratic state of society only by passing through a long series of more or less critical transformations, accomplished by violent efforts, and after numerous vicissitudes, in the course of which property, opinions, and power are rapidly transferred from one to another. (P. 320)

It is clear that we can expect the democratic revolution on a global scale not to be a smooth and easy political process but rather one of conflict, tumult, and upheaval, indeed even one in which the world turns upside down. There is therefore a particular importance in addressing the emphasis given to the idea of freedom in the past twenty years of discourse on economic liberalization and globalization. This neoliberal discourse has emphasized a Hayekian understanding of freedom as freedom above all for capital, for the movement of commodities, and for markets, that is, a freedom for the holders of property to pursue maximum flexibility and profit. In contrast, freedom as a popular concept is aligned with the protection of popular rights and the extension of popular participation, and thus with democracy. Freedom for the common man and woman is only possible when equality, justice, solidarity, citizenship, and finally democracy itself, are all fully integrated aspects of both theory and practice. Indeed, "the price of freedom is redistribution" is one way of formulating democratic theory (Sartori 1987). As Galbraith has pointed out, nothing so constrains the freedom of the individual as a complete absence of money. It bears repeating that economic globalization, and indeed the entire range of processes we are currently referring to as globalization, does not bring convergence to one narrowly constructed set of choices. Globalization actually opens up a wider range of choices to a wider range of social actors than any previous social system in world history. That is, globalization adds immense complexity to our global social order, not simplicity. This provides social forces today with an unprecedented scope for action, within which they may define new sites of action and new forms of social power, form new coalitions and solidarities (including transnational), find new institutional forms, and explore new ways of practicing governance in world order. By linking together directly the many diverse forms being experimented with in so many manifestations of social action, the potential resistance to globalization becomes the locus and medium of the transformation of globalization into global democracy. Therefore, analytically speaking, we should not understand resistance as being something external to globalization but rather as intrinsic or internal to the process of opening and to the greater complexity that globalization brings about. Globalization is characterized not by a uniformity but rather by a historical dialectic between homogenization and heterogenization, both processes occurring simultaneously and throughout the globe. Thus, there is likewise a historical dialectic between globalization and democratization, a process that is unavoidable. I firmly believe, on both historical and moral grounds, that this historical dialectic leads strongly, even inexorably, toward the practices and theory of global democracy, that is, to the globalization of democracy and the democratization of globalization. Insofar as neoliberal economic globalization has succeeded, it creates the conditions for further critical social responses that lead to renewed struggles for democratic freedoms and participation by the ordinary people affected by these changes. In these processes of renewed democratic struggles, we may expect to see continued efforts at self-government by many peoples and also expanded representation. Globalization allows the transcending of old established and fixed territorial units and borders of political representation, thus allowing a more territorially diffuse pattern of political community to emerge, and to do so globally. This process deepens democracy

by extending it to the global arena but moreover by also devolving power to self-constituting communities seeking self-government and representation in the political order, whether this be on a local, national, regional, or global level. A nascent and informal global peoples' assembly is therefore one aspect of these efforts to redefine and extend political representation beyond the confines of the present territorially bounded entities, that is, the states of the present international order and the United Nations system. Such processes are beginning to formulate global popular initiatives based on common concerns and to communicate these concerns to a whole panoply of political entities, above and beyond the national or state framework. Thus, a new tier of popular-and I would argue, legitimate-governance is gradually emerging alongside the existing global political order constituted of states and governments (Kiely 2000; Kumar 2000; Markoff 1999). We are witnessing ever-increasing popular will for initiatives on global environmental preservation, global peace and conflict resolution, global emergency relief, global rights or common standards, and the global alleviation of poverty, debt, illiteracy, and injustice. Thus, in my view, we are witnessing the birth of a common set of values that will define and animate the practice and the theory of global democracy The emergence of a global civil society is indeed linked to the emergence of an alternative world order (Cox 1999) and to the prospects for a more cosmopolitan form of democracy (Held 1997). THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?: THE IMPERATIVE OF MULTICTVILIZAT10NAL DIALOGUE In this sense, we may conclude that we are living through the (gradual or sudden?) demise of the old world order and the (slow or sudden?) birth of a new one. Economically, this new order is based on an increased level of global economic integration and unison. Politically, however, it is premised on the need to translate grassroots participatory political action into increasingly popular democratic forms of governance at local, national, regional, and global levels (Gills 2000c; 2001). Moreover, it is also based on a real need to combine the peoples and social forces of North and South in new ways, bringing together new coalitions drawn from movements around the world. The governments and the corporations of the world must now listen to and accommodate the demands of the peoples of the whole world, who represent the voice of the governed. This new reality, which in my view is an objective one and not mere idealism, therefore requires a new paradigm. This new paradigm of world order must be based profoundly on multicivilizational dialogue and universal inclusion. Rather than a political order based on one nation, we are moving toward the need for a political order based on one humanity, and only democratic norms can accommodate such a form of governance. Dialogue requires a dialogic approach. This means not simply sharing ideas derived from different cultures and religious traditions, or ideologies, and not simply toleration in the sense of listening and accepting a difference but something much more than that. The dialogic process that we need among civilizations must contain a process of progression to something different from where we started. That is, it is not enough simply to be content with understanding one another and all of our many differences, though tolerance is certainly preferable to intolerance and certainly necessary. But tolerance must now be seen as an absolute minimum for our world

order, not as its highest achievement. A dialogic approach to multicivilizational world order implies and requires that all the participants be willing to engage openly and willingly in a true dialogue in the spirit of mutual learning and progressing toward something new, something that is the product of dialogic communication itself. This something would therefore be a multicivilizational product, not the product of one dominant civilization presiding over the rest. It would consist of a set of common values, around which a new sense of genuine world community could be based. It is therefore not the mere repetition of established values or civilizational perspectives and their mutual toleration. Toleration is a necessary condition for the new paradigmatic order but not a sufficient one. What is sufficient will have to be the product of multicivilizational dialogue. The criteria for genuine multicivilizational dialogue must begin with the desire to arrive at a common set of core values that will lead to new democratic and popular forms of global governance, which go beyond the confines of the existing power structure. After the tragic events of 11 September 2001 in the United States, many there have been consoled by peoples all over the earth, who share with them one of the most fundamental values of allthe recognition of the value and sanctity of human life. It did not matter whether the people were Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Confucian, or any other cultural and religious heritage-all agreed that these were terrible acts of mass murder. This crisis therefore shows us that humanity can unite around explicitly shared values, setting aside our differences in the realization of a higher unity. Other common values can be discovered through dialogue. We need to identify common values that allow a new sense of global citizenship to take real shape and to form our new political consciousness, underpinning the gradual emergence of global democracy. We must explore what global justice may mean in a multicivilizational dialogue. Likewise, global solidarity may be a central value or key concept by which we can strive to achieve a new sense of humanity's oneness, its unity, and its common interests, which will animate the popular politics of the coming world order. Global history, moreover, is the idea of a humanocentric account and appreciation of the common heritage of all humankind, based on the mutual and cumulative contributions and influences of all peoples and cultures to the common progress of humanity. We must reconstruct knowledge of the human past so that we can escape from the narrow confines of national history and teach new generations a global vision of humanity's past and its future. On this basis, we can establish a more common basis for both civilization and democracy, which unites all humanity in one common heritage and future. This is the United Nations year of civilizational dialogue, and that, in my view, is symbolic of the call to an alternative world order. We cannot tolerate the old order any longer, where a few ultrarich and militarily powerful states rule via a universalism that is in fact neither truly universal nor even cosmopolitan. Nor can we allow the world order to drift into a nightmare scenario of a clash of civilizations where intolerance and hatred begin to tear our world apart and leave us all spiritually and materially impoverished. We have only one choice, and it is in fact based on realism, not utopian idealism. The old world order is unstable, and only a leap into multicivilizational dialogue can provide a real solution. We have the historic choice of either bringing about this new world order based on the fruits of dialogic communication or suffering

the consequences of failing to do so. It is the end of the world as we know it, but this should be a cause not for despair but rather for renewed hope and vigorous effort. There is a whole new world to be gained and so much in it to be shared. Despite anger and hurt, we must turn from vengeance and by our nobler reason find our virtue in that rarer action that leads us to justice and peace, for all humanity, now and to come. The terrible events of 11 September 2001 have changed the world. Apart from the horror and revulsion that so many people have felt at witnessing such atrocities, there has also emerged a widespread sense of unease and foreboding about the future. This malaise of the spirit is fueled by fears that even worse acts of terrorism and perhaps widening warfare and conflict are to come and by a pervasive sense that we do not know what the future will bring. One thing seems apparent, however: we stand at a crossroads of modern and human history, facing a choice between world orders based on very different principles. Will we enter an age of chaos and conflict, in which the claims of security override those of liberty and in which the rich and powerful protect themselves at the continued expense of the poor and powerless? Or will we once and for always rise above and go beyond the old paradigms of international relations and economics and invent a new form of world order in which all peoples share in both its governance and its benefits? This, to my mind, is the real significance of the present crisis and will remain its central problem until we find a genuine and common solution that will be, in effect, part of the global democratic revolution. References Bourdieu, Pierre, ed. 1999. The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. Oxford, UK: Polity. Bull, Hedley. 1977. The anarchical society. London: Macmillan. Carr, Edward Hallett. 1968. Nationalism and after. London: Macmillan. Cox, Michael, G. John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi, eds. 2000. American democracy promotion: Impulses, strategies, and impacts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cox, Robert W. 1999. Civil society at the turn of the millennium: Prospects for an alternative world order. Review of International Studies 25 (1): 3-28. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1840. Democracy in America. Vol. 11. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 2000. Foreword: The social Left and the market system. In Globalization and the politics of resistance, edited by Barry K. Gills, ix-xiv. London: Macmillan. Gills, Barry K. 2000a. The crisis of postwar east Asian capitalism: American power, democracy and the vicissitudes of globalization. Review of International Studies 26:381-403.

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